Liverpool lead the Premier League form table based on the last 10 matches with 24 points out of a possible 30 but does this really make the Reds the most in-form team? Scoreboard Journalism investigated….

FOOTBALL – Manchester City opened its new £200 million academy in December 2014 but young talents have been given very little opportunity at City in recent seasons. A new piece of research looks at how the age structures of teams in the Premier League have changed and why Manchester City are probably on the verge of needing a serious change in order to sustain their success of recent years. Continue reading →

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Sixty-one days ago – today is day 62 – Tottenham Hotspur lined up in Turkey to play their final Europa League group match against Besiktas which they went on to lose 1-0. Two days earlier, Liverpool drew 1-1 with FC Basel in what was their final Champions League match of the season. This evening, the two clubs play each other and for both, it will be their 17th match of the last nine weeks, the most played by any European club over that period.

With 17 matches remaining in this season’s Premier League, the race to the title currently involves just two teams, one of which has around twice the chance of the other of ending the season as 2014/2015 Premier League champions. Five more clubs have a realistic chance of a top-4 spot whilst eight teams are currently involved in the relegation battle. This leaves just five – West Ham, Swansea City, Stoke City, Newcastle United and Everton – without much left to play for.

Due to basing the seedings for the Europa League draws on six matches within uneven groupings which were created by the UEFA coefficient systems, the seedings for today’s Europa League draw do not actually separate the best and worst remaining teams into two separate groups. Using a longer term rating system, the Euro Club Index, reveals that the seeded and unseeded groups both contain some of the best teams left in the competition and the absolute best trio left in the competition are all unseeded.

Updating a metric like the Seasonal Comparative Results metric SCoRe on a weekly basis provides all sorts of insights. I know for example that West Ham’s current improvement is almost entirely due to results away from home as they took 0 points last season from the away matches they have played to date which this season have produced 11 points. The Hammers’ total improvement is 14 compared to the equivalent fixtures in 2013/2014. Similarly Manchester United’s poorer performance this term is due to being worse away from home than David Moyes’ United were. However, the biggest thing to strike me on United is that if they had played their fixtures in the same order last season as they have this, they would have been top of last season’s Premier League after 15 matches.